More than a year after an explosion of sparks, soot and frigid helium shut it down, the world's biggest and most expensive physics experiment, known as the Large Hadron Collider, is poised to start up again. In December, if all goes well, protons will start smashing together in an underground racetrack outside Geneva in a search for forces and particles that reigned during the first trillionth of a second of the Big Bang.

<b>Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science.</b> I'm not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I'm talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. <b>A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.</b>

Holger Bech Nielsen of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, put this idea forward in a series of papers with such titles as <b>"Test of Effect From the Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal"</b> and "Search for Future Influence From LHC," posted on the physics Web site arXiv.org in the last year and a half.

According to the so-called Standard Model that rules almost all physics, the Higgs is responsible for imbuing other elementary particles with mass.

"It must be our prediction that all Higgs-producing machines shall have bad luck," Nielsen said in an e-mail message. In an unpublished essay, Nielsen said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the U.S. Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time - perhaps too much time - to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

The collider was built by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to accelerate protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts around an 18-mile underground racetrack and then crash them together into primordial fireballs.

For the record, as of the middle of September, CERN engineers hope to begin to collide protons at the so-called injection energy of 450 billion electron volts in December and then ramp up the energy until the protons have 3.5 trillion electron volts of energy apiece and then, after a short Christmas break, real physics can begin.

Maybe.

Nielsen and Ninomiya started laying out their case for doom in spring 2008.<b> It was later that fall, of course, after the CERN collider was turned on, that a connection between two magnets vaporized, shutting down the collider for more than a year.</b>

Nielsen called that "a funny thing that could make us to believe in the theory of ours."

He agreed that skepticism would be in order. After all, most big science projects, including the Hubble Space Telescope, have gone through a period of seeming jinxed. At CERN, the beat goes on: Last weekend the French police arrested a particle physicist who works on one of the collider experiments, on suspicion of conspiracy with a North African wing of al Qaeda.

<b>Nielsen and Ninomiya have proposed a kind of test: that CERN engage in a game of chance, a "card-drawing" exercise using perhaps a random-number generator to discern bad luck from the future. If the outcome was sufficiently unlikely, say drawing the one spade in a deck with 100 million hearts, the machine would either not run at all, or only at low energies unlikely to find the Higgs.</b>

Sure, it's crazy, and CERN should not and is not about to mortgage its investment to a coin toss. The theory was greeted on some blogs with comparisons to Harry Potter. But craziness has a fine history in a physics that talks routinely about cats being dead and alive at the same time and about anti-gravity puffing out the universe.

As Niels Bohr, Nielsen's late countryman and one of the founders of quantum theory, once told a colleague:<b> "We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct."</b>

huh? Can someone break this down for us stupid people? I understand CERN and the machine, and all of that, but im not understanding how this theory works.

gblowfish

10-21-2009, 12:40 PM

Sci-Fi Geeks piss me off.

Hammock Parties

10-21-2009, 03:07 PM

Once I got laid, all bets for the future of the universe were off. This is just the beginning...

jidar

10-21-2009, 03:22 PM

huh? Can someone break this down for us stupid people? I understand CERN and the machine, and all of that, but im not understanding how this theory works.

There really isn't much to explain.

The LHC was built to detect the Higgs Boson (aka The God Particle) er.. mostly. The Higgs is (should be) a fundamental building block of reality that gives mass to matter.

The idea is that the creation of this particle would be against the laws of nature and so "nature" fights back by keeping us from being able to create it.

It is a pretty insane theory really.

Stewie

10-21-2009, 03:29 PM

There's no such thing as a random number generator....

You can get close to true random number generation with an algorithm, but you're right, it's never absolutely random due to the seed number issue. It also depends on the complexity of the algorithm. The only true random number generators are physical in nature where no seeding is required.